Human rights came into life in 1776 with the American Declaration of Independence, and in 1789 with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. They are these fundamental principles that have been constantly re-examined, recontextualized and expanded towards new rights in their history up to the present day. These principles are political and social as well as legal, as they concern not only the fundamental rights and freedoms granted or to be granted to individuals, but also various aspects of collective life. In this sense, the history of human rights is also the history of the interconnections and intersections between these three fields: law, politics and sociality. The understanding of rights under different generations, which became widespread in the late twentieth century (Karel Vasak, 1977), also bears the traces of these historical transformations.The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen guaranteed people's fundamental rights to life, liberty, security, property, fair trial, voting and resistance to oppression. These “political and civil rights”, which correspond to the demands of individuals for freedom, especially freedom of conscience, and protection from state intervention, are nowadays considered within the framework of the first generation of human rights. These rights are also referred to as the “rights to liberty” (droits-libertés) or “negative rights”.
“Social and economic rights”, which have begun to be recognised by governments by the 1940s, as a result of the industrial revolution and the working-class struggle, are today referred to as the second generation of human rights. Rights such as the right to education, the right to work and housing, and the right to a minimum level of material security are included in this framework as a requirement for individuals to participate fully in social life and to realise themselves. This time, the necessity of the welfare state’s intervention is emphasised.
Starting from the second half of the twentieth century, the second generation of human rights were gained as a result of struggles seeking to remedy the inadequacies or shortcomings of the first generation of rights in practice, thus creating the conditions for their universal realisation. Similarly, different social struggles have been engaged to complement and recontextualise these two generations of rights. Undoubtedly, the women's movement, the black freedom and civil rights movement, the LGBTQ+ movement, and the claims of cultural minorities are the major movements that have drawn attention to violations of rights outside the scope of the second generation of human rights, which emphasised economic inequalities, the concept of distributive justice, the principle of the welfare state. Thus, they have expanded both the field of struggle against other similar violations and the intellectual horizon of human rights. The third generation of human rights discourse, including solidarity rights such as identity rights, cultural rights and collective rights, has gradually gained a place in the field these movements and mobilisations opened. The “peoples' rights to sustainable development, peace, a habitable environment and a share in the human heritage” are addressed within this framework.
The classification of the fourth generation of rights, which has only recently begun to be defined, has emerged as a result of the threats to and violations of fundamental rights caused by scientific and technological developments. In addition to the personal data protection, right to information, privacy and bioethics, sensitivities arising from climate change and animal rights also occupy an important place in this generation of rights.
However, it is critical to keep in mind that the boundaries between these four generations of rights are not sharp, but rather blurred, and that a certain right can be addressed within more than one generation. For example, we see that the right to the city, while sometimes referred to as solidarity rights, is at other times included in the fourth generation of rights. Similarly, the right to education, as a fundamental right, can be considered both as a social right that requires the contribution of the state and as a cultural right related to the right to participate in the cultural life of a particular community, to protect the common values of the community in question and to pass them on to the next generations in the case of cultural minorities. More importantly, the right to freedom of expression, which is among the first generation of rights, can be considered not only as an individual right, but also as a civic right that is at the basis of all claims to rights, to the extent that it is not only the right to express one's opinion, but also the right of the other to hear and read the expressed opinion, as Claude Lefort states. (See Şeyla Benhabib's “Right to Communication” as a universal right to participation).
All these categories of rights, without denying the holistic character of human rights, tell us how an expansion from abstract rights to concrete rights has taken place in the historical transformation of these rights. On the other hand, these categories are important tools for realising that the transformation in question reveals itself as an infinitely open transformation, not as a completed or complete one, and that society is constantly subjecting itself to questioning in this way. Although it is not possible to think of human rights independently of the historical content they have acquired over time, they also contain a normative core that remains transhistorical and cannot be reduced to a historical content. (See Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of Publicness, trans. T. Bora, İletişim, 2023) This is precisely the meaning of their universality. This spectrum, expanding from fundamental rights and freedoms to social rights, followed by solidarity rights that are not limited to human existence but also include nature and other living beings with whom we share the planet, then finally to bioethics and to our commonality in the digital world. This makes us realise that rights emerge as a language of intersubjectivity or inter-citizenship that goes far beyond their individual character. As founding members, when choosing the name “4 Generation of Rights Social Research Association”, we considered it important to emphasise both the history of the struggles that brought these rights to life and how each generation of rights following the previous one actually complements and recontextualises the rights previously recognised. In our work, we aim to produce a discourse that cuts across and brings together different perspectives, without forgetting that this dynamic aspect of rights is a constitutive quality for them. Although the framework of 4th generation of rights is still under discussion, we have found it appropriate to include these rights in our name by defending the openness of the existing rights to be constantly complemented by new rights. On this occasion, we would like to take this opportunity to state that under the roof of our association, we share an understanding that, on the one hand, recognises the importance of the historical transformation of rights and their dynamic nature, and on the other hand, is aware that this transformation constantly complements them into a richer whole instead of dividing or separating them
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